Antietam.
A big gun boomed far away in the dark. From nearer came the snip-snap of
picket-shooting, which increased to a rattle and settled into volleying.
On the hill to the right some one climbed on a gun-carriage and stood
vaguely against the sky.
Shadows came running from the door of a barn into the grass. A sleeper
cried out and sat up at their feet, rubbing his trodden hand.
"What do you make it?"
"We have no troops over there. They're shooting each other."
"Shooting their midnight dreams."
"Midnight! It's past three."
"How should I know? I was king of the Pleiades five minutes ago."
"Time for trouble to begin?"
"It won't be light for an hour."
"No. Turn in, gentlemen."
Shadows sat upright in the grass and muttered to each other.
"What's the Pleiades, Jimmie?"
"Do' know. Wa'n't any at home as I know of."
"Stars, you galoop."
"That's what the Johnnies were shooting at."
"Hey! He must 'a' been jokin'," from the shadow called Jimmie.
"Who?"
"The cap'n said he was king of 'em, he did."
"Oh, go to--"
"Can't see any stars to-night."
The distant volleying died down to a rattle--to the crack of a single
rifle far away, lonely in the immense night, the encircling silence.
The woods went around behind the hill on the right. On the left a grassy
field stretched off in the dark. One knew by remembrance that it sloped
down a gradual mile, till it came somewhere to a slow creek with a mud
bottom. Outposts lay forward in a thin line of woods. Some one said that
the pickets were in an open field beyond, and that some of them belonged
to the other side. In that tense, visionary hour one did not conceive of
an enemy as of separate men, watchful in fields, sleeping in distant
woods, but of a creature, a thing of folded miles, crouching, sinister,
hostile, with red tongue and bitter fangs, waiting for the dawn.
Some of the dark lumps in the grass were motionless, some stirred and
muttered. Through the open door of the barn a group of men could be seen
around a lantern and leaning forward. One of them marked and pointed
with his finger. A horse kicked and squealed on the hill among the guns.
A dog howled in some indefinite distance and direction. The birds began
to twitter in the trees of the beetling woods. A creeping wind chilled
the dew on the faces of sleepers and watchers in the open. The blackness
grew conscious--dimly gray.
Two or three came out of the barn and ran behind it. In a moment there
was a cluttered thudding of horses' feet, which died away down the
field. Pickets began shooting in front. Little things whimpered and
whined overhead. An officer, by the glimmer of his straps, went forward
and shouted in the woods. The near firing stopped, or most of it, but
the things overhead continued to whimper and whine. The lumps on the
grass began to sit up and strip off blankets.
"What's he stopping 'em for?"
"Nothing in it."
"The Johnnies keep it up."
"They're firing high."
Fires of gathered dead-wood sprang up on the woods' edge--a score in
sight, then a hundred, smoking and crackling. A low murmur, a sense of
multitude, grew as the darkness lifted its oppression. Men sipped and
munched by the fires. Some one shouted, "Get ready, men!" A cannon
belched and bellowed on the hill to the right, then another and another,
to a passionate, throbbing roar.
"Company B, forward! Halt here!"
Men poured around in crowds and formed in triple lines. A shell dropped
through the roof of the empty barn and splintered some of the boards
outward with its burst.
The misty sky was breaking for a clear day. Red clouds of sunrise
streamed like pennants in the southwest. A man in the front line pitched
forward and lay still.
"Who's that?"
"I do' know."
"Aiken, I guess."
"There, now! You jabbed me twice. Hold up your bayonet."
Men panted as if they had already been running, and shifted their feet
nervously.
"To-day's my birthday."
"Going to celebrate it all right."
Several laughed in high, strained cackles.
"What we waiting for, cap'n?"
"Don't know. Here. Where's your cartridge-belt? Stay where you are.
Who's that down? Hand up his belt."
A shout came up the line, like the ripple of a shaken rope. They were
suddenly in the woods. Men jumped from the ground and joined. They were
in another field of grass. One heard nothing more but the thump of his
own feet and the singing blood in his ears; not the throb of the
artillery; not the cry of the man who threw up his arms and fell against
him; not the discharge of his own rifle, though he saw the smoke, and
with the next stride his face went through the smoke.
It was easy running in the grass, the long, level fields, a fence now
and then, a stone wall; but then came a slope and ploughed ground, where
one stumbled and fell with his face in the brown dirt, and fancied
himself hit in the pit of the stomach--only, why not dead?--saw the
lines gone on; got up, and ran after to the edge of a field of standing
corn. A fenced road was beyond, a white building with a central, squat
chimney, overhung by heavy woods full of smoke. The lower part of the
smoke bellied forward, jumped, and trembled at the edge.
There seemed to be singularly few in the running line now. One seemed,
in fact, to be running back unaccountably, down the slope and the
ploughed ground, into another triple line, a surf of guns, caps, hot
faces, and innumerable legs. One seemed to be caught up and rushed back,
ploughed ground and slope, and lined up at the top, there loading and
firing across the corn. Comparatively it was restful, mechanical. To
find one's cartridge-belt empty at last was a disappointment. It seemed
to imply the need of doing something else, something new and untried.
The smoke in the woods ahead was thinner.
"I guess Johnnie's belt's empty, too."
"I guess we're going in to see. Here we go!"
They ran into the corn. One did not feel military--rather,
happy-go-lucky. The enemy behind the fence and in the road all ran away
to the woods, where there seemed nothing much going on. It looked like a
gaping mouth, the tree-trunks like black teeth, and the smoke from the
blacker throat drifted between the teeth. It seemed to have sucked in
its hot breath and red tongue--to be waiting. The fence was nearly
reached when it let go a thousand red tongues, a voice that crashed, a
breath that was hot and smoky, that jumped and trembled. One dropped
behind the fence and felt for cartridges.
"Hi, Jimmie! Going to get out o' this."
"Close up, men. Steady there."
"That's the colonel."
"Yep."
"Draw them off, now. Steady. Close up."
"Belts, boys--look for belts."
They went back slowly, stripping the cartridge-belts from men fallen
between the corn-hills, and firing at the smoke; into the grass, at
length, and at length to a halt in cover of broken fence and line of
weeds, hard by the woods they had left at dawn. The enemy spread over
the cornfield. One seemed to resent it on account of owning that
cornfield with a more than ancestral heritage. There were fresh columns
coming up on the right. The broken brigades in the grass watched them
pass. Their line mounted and stood still on the ridge, outlined against
the woods and volleying evenly. Gaps opened and closed. Some one said,
"They're old troops." They went into the corn with a rush. Whatever
happened, it sounded like an explosion of a half-hour's length, and
after it the cornfield and ploughed land were empty, except for the
smoke, and the wounded and dead, some hidden in the corn, some seen
against the brown fallow.
The mouth of the black woods gaped; there were its black teeth and
drifting breath. Fragments of the columns were drawing off to the covert
of a bulge of woods on the right. That part of the battle stood still.
The sun was half-way up the sky.
* * * * *
"I fought, cap'n! I wasn't afraid!"
He had red, downy cheeks, an indistinct nose, and white eyelashes.
"Terrible warrior you are, Jimmie. Your fingers are dripping."
Jimmie looked at his hand. A little red brook ran down the palm. He
turned white and sick.
"Scratched, Jimmie. Tie it up for him."
"I never seen it," in an awed voice.
The officer went on.
"Get your breath. See your guns are all right. What's that?"
The man sat staring at his wrecked and twisted rifle. Another man
laughed hoarsely.
"Scrap-iron he picked up."
"'Tain't, either"--angrily. "It's my rifle. Been holding it all day.
What's gone with it? Something hit it."
It had been shattered in his hands by a flying missile.
Some one rode up whom the captain saluted.
"How many left here?"
"About forty."
"Colonel Morley?"
"In the cornfield."
"Major Cutting?"
"All right, sir, over there."
"How are your men?"
"Pretty fair, sir. They'll go in again."
A mile down the valley the fight was growing hotter; a ravine was full
of smoke, a jam around a bridge, a line of blue hills beyond; up nearer,
columns were massing by a sunken road, under batteries playing from
opposite hills across the creek; a village lay to the west. The sun
made another jump up the sky. The fields around were empty, except for
the lines in covert behind the fences, and here and there a horseman
galloping, here and there a horse but no horseman. The enemy were in the
corn again, shooting intermittently. Smoke drifted up and turned white
against the glistening blue. The batteries beyond the woods on the right
broke out again. New clouds of smoke floated overhead and dimmed the
sun. In the grass-fields still the crouched lines waited in covert of
weeds and fences. Hours that had shot past in the charge, the struggle
and retreat, now stretched like sleepless nights. Company B muttered and
swore.
"What's the use of waiting?"
"Le's go in!"
The captain and lieutenant lay at a distance on the grass. Neither of
them answered. Jimmie felt around his belt.
"I got fifteen cartridges."
"How's your scratch, Jimmie?"
"Ho, I don' care for that. Why don' we fight some more?"
The captain said, "Do you hear those minie-balls?"
The lieutenant, "What of them?"
"The pitch, of course; they go from E flat to F, and then drop to D.
That's a very pretty interval."
"You've got an ear! They do sort of go up and down."
"Le's fight some more."
"Oh, Jimmie, dry up!"
High noon over the corn, and the woods, and the white building with the
squat chimney.
Jimmie again. "Le's fight so--Oh!"
He leaped, flung up his hands and fell--his rifle clattering behind--his
head rolled over once and lay still. The man next him lifted Jimmie's
head, laid it down gently and turned away. Some one farther along said,
"Pshaw!" One still farther, "Who's that?"--"Jimmie"--"Oh!"
The captain took the rifle and belt with fifteen counted cartridges and
walked down the line to the man with the shattered rifle.
"Here you are."
Company B was silent, and crouched more closely. The sun slipped down
perceptibly and burned red in the smoke. The throb of the unseen guns
grew Quicker. From woods' edge and cornfield, from covered lines in the
weeds by zigzag fences, the smoke was living and leaping, Company B busy
and interested. A horseman clattered by. "Get ready!"
"Bayonets?"
"All right. Get into it now!"
Grass-fields, fences, and ploughed ground; all voices of the
battle-field awake; yelling and cheering, crash of musketry, crack of
rifles, roar of guns, shells that whooped in flight and burst into a
score of individual screams. Beneath all, an undertone, a rumbling,
grinding, splintering sound, the organ bass of the field; into the corn,
that rustled as before, that brushed in turn against Northern and
Southern faces, that sheltered alike from the slant sun all still faces
in the furrows, pale and ghastly and grimed, thick together, piled dead
over dead. Then came the fence, the road, the squat-chimneyed building,
the gaping woods with black teeth and white breath; and Company B. Reg.
Third, went into the wished-for woods at last, with empty belts and
point-on bayonets; went through them, and saw the sun beyond, and broken
lines running across open fields. Some thirty of them came back and sat
down by the white building gloomily. The captain looked them over and
hummed. "The Campbells are coming--trala, trala." The sun dropped low.
The throb of the guns down the valley grew slower, duller, fainter.
Sanitary men with stretchers pushed to and fro in the corn. The woods
grew dark, the fields dusky. Campfires crackled beside the road, Company
B's by the white building. Tin cups were poked into the coals.
Conversation was grumbling, fragmentary.
"Jimmie's shut down on pretty sudden."
"Jimmie! There's fifty better men out of this company dropped in their
tracks! I don't see why you're so cut on Jimmie."
"I wished it was some one else." The speaker's voice broke. "He was such
a damn fool."
"Oh, I see."
"Know the name of that creek?"
"No."
"It's the Antietam."
"What of it? It ain't the Wyantenaug, that's all I care."
"And this thing's a Dunker church."
"You got more useless information 'n would set up a college."
"Pennsylvania fellow told me over there Dunkers are sort of Dutch
Baptists."
"Oh, go get some wood!"
The captain was in the road. He walked over and leaned on the splintered
fence and watched the red lights of a hundred little fires play ghostly
games with black shadows in the foliage of the woods. Men were pushing
about in the corn, rustling the blades. The stars were out, the young
moon setting slim and lovely with the old moon on her arm. The distant
crackle of rifles, belated fragments of the battle, seemed futile,
isolated, mistaken and sad in the light of the drooping, withdrawing
moon.
Fifty feet away was a large camp-fire of fence rails. Of the men about
it, one had lean, long limbs and face, wore a long black coat and black
slouched hat, and talked continuously in solemn, flowing bass. The rest
listened, absorbed. Now and then one of them laughed.
The captain drew near. The lean talker unfolded his legs and rose.
"Gods! The anchorite? Gentlemen, who might this be?"
"Cap'n Windham, Company B," said some one.
"He hath grown a beard! In complete steel, revisits the glimpses of the
moon! A Hotspur of the North, will kill him six or seven dozen
Confederates before breakfast and say, 'Fie on this quiet life!' Will
tootle a reed no more! Will dive into the bottom of the deep, pluck up
drowned honor by the locks, and call it vanity! Vat for a fool of a
musician!"
"How are you, Jack?"
"A war correspondent I, John Roland Mavering, who will celebrate you, a
Homer to Achilles, who wants to know for his invocation how you happen
not to be dead."
They locked arms and sauntered along the road in leisurely pursuit of
the moon.